What’s the most egregious example of a difficulty spike in any video game you’ve played?

[Islamic Jihad Rocket]

Title, tell me about any time you’ve played a video game and when the difficulty suddenly spikes to a point it becomes downright ridiculous.

Timespltters 2 comes to mind, Arcade League has several event's which suddenly spike in difficulty. Combined with the games terrible aim controls, and the AI being downright cheap at times. It creates a frustrating experience, there’s too many events like this that just suddenly become hard as fuck and it makes me never want to try and 100% the game because they’re all a pain in the ass. Double Bill is probably one of the worst offenders, it’s legitimately RNG to even win.

 

[Red Facist Bunny]

Helldivers latest Update.

 

[30+GameOvers]

If you know, you know

 

[Jeff Q. Anime]

Yakuza Kiwami final boss fight... If you didn't grind out all the learnable skills via the tournament and etc. It's hell. The checkpoint can bring you back 20+ minutes in time depending on how long it takes you. enemies revive, multiple health bars, if you know you know. It's arguably not that bad if you *did* grind the requisite skills out, but, I didn't, and I did manage to win on my first try without having tiger drop (among other things) and running out of health potions in phase 2. I'd gotten through it without too much trouble up to that point, but even if you do have the better moves it's legendarily difficult.

There's also Persona 4 Golden, which I first played on PC, and after I got first-move party wiped by a random encounter and lost 30 minutes of progress, I turned the game onto baby mode and never looked back.

 

[KingofSomething]

It's probably not the highest spike, but it's the one deeply ingrained in my memory. The jump in difficulty between the first and second level of the Lion King game is fucking ridiculous. The first level is your basic tutorial level to learn the controls and almost impossible to die unless you just run face first into enemies.and the second levels hits you with nothing but precise jumps over water(death pits) and several autorun segments that also have precise jumps with instadeath if you fuck up. It's made worse by the fact that it was purposely done to eat up the timer on rentals.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

The PS2 Grand Theft Auto games have some brutally difficult and/or buggy missions that come out of nowhere and then go right back to being relatively straight-forward again, with "Wrong Side of the Tracks" in San Andreas being a particularly infamous example.

ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS FOLLOW THE DAMN TRAIN, CJ.

 

[Kurohige]

In a game infamous for its horrendous level curves, need I say any more?

Of course, any seasoned player can deal with it. However, that first blind experience is a doozy.

 

[marvlouslie]

The PS2 Grand Theft Auto games have some brutally difficult and/or buggy missions that come out of nowhere and then go right back to being relatively straight-forward again, with "Wrong Side of the Tracks" in San Andreas being a particularly infamous example.

ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS FOLLOW THE DAMN TRAIN, CJ.

The one that always got up my ass was the mini plane mission. Fuck that one in particular.

 

[ShapelyMutton]

Not too extreme all things considered but the Cerberus boss fight in DMC3 filtered a lot of people

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

The one that always got up my ass was the mini plane mission. Fuck that one in particular.

I re-played San Andreas a couple years back and did that one on my first try. I felt like a true hardcore Gamerman until I found out the PC port dramatically nerfed the difficulty of the mission.

 

[marvlouslie]

I re-played San Andreas a couple years back and did that one on my first try. I felt like a true hardcore Gamerman until I found out the PC port dramatically nerfed the difficulty of the mission.

The controls were always the bane of my existence. Boat / Car controls were okay in a lot of GTA games, but flying anything (heli or plane) was always fucking shit.

 

[Kiwi Andy]

In my gaming career nothing came close to this dude in SMT Nocturne. He is of course beatable but the spike is insane.

 

[dick brain]

Halo 2 matchmaking around level 17, when you had to learn to BXR and doubleshot to keep up.

 

[Krokodil Overdose]

Swamp Thing in Painkiller. It's the game's first puzzle boss, and it traps you on a tiny island with no clue as to how to actually hurt this thing. It's not actually a hard fight, but mechanically, it's completely out of left field.

Honorable mention to the Forest from the same game. It's only available on the highest difficulty level (so no souls/healing/demon morph) and the card condition is "finish the level without using any cards." And there are more of the witches from the Town level. Good luck!

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

JRPGs where 1v1s occur often come to mind. Examples are Super Mario RPG, FFX, and especially FFT's Ramza vs Wiegraf battle.

It's probably not the highest spike, but it's the one deeply ingrained in my memory. The jump in difficulty between the first and second level of the Lion King game is fucking ridiculous. The first level is your basic tutorial level to learn the controls and almost impossible to die unless you just run face first into enemies.and the second levels hits you with nothing but precise jumps over water(death pits) and several autorun segments that also have precise jumps with instadeath if you fuck up. It's made worse by the fact that it was purposely done to eat up the timer on rentals.

That's a great one, it murdered my Blockbuster rental.

 

[Pissmaster]

Goldeneye 007's Control level. Guard Natalya while enemies come in from all over and try to kill her. She is fragile. Even in the rerelease, it took me a few tries, on easy. As a kid, it was crazy strenuous and I never wanted to do that ever again.

The one that always got up my ass was the mini plane mission. Fuck that one in particular.

I beat it on PS2, but never actually completed San Andreas. Oh well.

and especially FFT's Ramza vs Wiegraf battle.

Oh yeah, that. I replayed FFT a couple of years ago, using the magic of the speedup button to blast through a whole lot of slow grinding, and even with a disgustingly overleveled Ramza, I think at something like level 70, I still had trouble. If you don't have the right skills, you're done. And isn't that one where you can lock yourself out of being able to grind, because they put a save point right before that battle, so you can't go back to the map? It's really easy to softlock your run right there.

 

[Calandrino]

It's probably not the highest spike, but it's the one deeply ingrained in my memory. The jump in difficulty between the first and second level of the Lion King game is fucking ridiculous. The first level is your basic tutorial level to learn the controls and almost impossible to die unless you just run face first into enemies.and the second levels hits you with nothing but precise jumps over water(death pits) and several autorun segments that also have precise jumps with instadeath if you fuck up. It's made worse by the fact that it was purposely done to eat up the timer on rentals.

Even though the Lion King guy says Disney forced them to make it hard because of muh rentals I'm like 95% sure he's lying. Other Disney licensed games don't have difficulty spikes like that, especially not in the second level. Sure dude, the Disney suits MADE you write shitty platform collision code, that makes sense.

 

[Coldgrip]

Urban Reign for the PS2. First couple stages are tutorials, the ones after are somewhat challenging, but not too bad. Stage 6 is where the game decides to stop pulling punches and expects you to of mastered all the mechanics. Then there's your character. Didn't like how you were building them? Tough, start a new game then.

 

[herefortheactualthreads]

This peak autism. Nigga dances with 5 ludiloco pokeymans and spams Health potions and rain to keep his team alive.

i literally had to grind the levels because i was too young and stupid for strategy.

 

[Krimjob]

Code Vein. Didn't die too often in that one and had a lot of fun. Then came the infamous dual boss battle towards the end.

It's not even difficult, it's just broken. Enemy attacks clip through the pillars, interrupting your heals. Dealing with two enemies at the same time with the camera is quite hard.

Clearly a boss made for the co-op feature, but I played it long after release so not really an option.

Now that I think about it, that whole level is fucking hard. You don't get a single checkpoint in it, so you have to get far enough to unlock several shortcuts, but the only checkpoint is right by the boss.